Education, a partial solution for permanent change!
We Love Kids has run a literacy school for nearly 7 years in Phnom Penh Cambodia for Vietnamese kids who have “fallen between the cracks” when their parents came to Cambodia looking for temporary work, trying to escape the grinding, endemic poverty still devestating parts of the Mekong Delta. There is dramatic economic growth in Vietnam, but many folks haven’t been a part of it…
Nhiep’s family is an example of that. Nhiep (ny-iep) came with his parents over 15 years ago, and his dad, though well over 60, still works construction (heavy manual labor) on various construction sites in Phnom Penh. Nhiep came to our literacy school over 5 years ago, and learned just enough Vietnamese to enable him to be able to sign his name and to be able to survive, though he speaks Khmer (Cambodian) fluently. We hadn’t seen Nhiep for several years, though his sister is one of our star students (Diem is 15, and going to one of our partner schools). Suddenly Nhiep started coming to our Sunday discipleship group, and said he has made his decision: he wanted to be baptized…he told us that one of his Vietnamese teachers at the We Love Kids literacy school several years before had helped him to pray for the Lord to take control of his life, and now he was choosing a new path! Needless to say, we were totally surprised…Nhiep has been as faithful as anyone could be about coming to our Sunday group, and is now bringing his friends!
Nhiep also works construction…what else can he do? He has no other options but the daily grind of heavy manual labor (in places like Cambodia there isn’t any fancy machinery, it’s all done by hand, with very few safety laws in place).
Spiritually, Nhiep is really growing. But, he is still only semi-literate, and we at We Love Kids have a goal to change that. We are trying to start adult literacy in Khmer and Vietnamese. We need to increase our staff to be able to do that. We need all of you to help us move things forward!
Nhiep, a young man whose life has changed